A little bit of everything, a whole lot of nothing.

Month: May 2018

Battlebond has been fully spoiled at this point, and there was one clear winner in my mind when it came to new legendary creatures to build a deck around: Najeela, the Blade-Blossom.

Najeela appears to be a mono red creature at first glance, and were that the case she wouldn’t be nearly as exciting of a prospective general. She, like General Tazri before her, is a mono-colored commander that has a 5-color activated ability, and it’s a good one. Being a WUBRG commander means we have access to all of the strengths of each color, along with the best warriors in each color. We want this to be a warriors matter deck, mainly because of her abilities. When Najeela is on the battlefield, any time a warrior attacks (including herself) you get to create a 1/1 warrior token that’s tapped and attacking. So basically you get an additional creature for each creature that attacks. To top this off, for WUBRG you get an additional combat phase with each creature getting trample, lifelink and haste. Even more busted, this activated ability doesn’t cause Najeela to tap, meaning it can be use more than once per turn as long as you have the mana. If you can swing with 5 warriors, you’ll actually be swinging with 10, then you pay WUBRG and swing with those 10 to get 20 and well, you get the picture. Being a 5-color deck, we’ll need to work on ramping and mana fixing, so here’s some tools to do that with:

Ramp:

Besides mana rocks and the usual green ramp spells, we have some other support here. Radha in both of her forms will provide green or red mana depending on some circumstances, but can be valuable mana for post combat main phases. Ditto Neheb, though you’ll want to keep some of the other colors open so that you can cast additional spells. Chromatic Lantern gives all of your lands all colors of mana, and Cryptolith Rite gives the same to your creatures (think about using the tokens you’re producing for additional mana). Lastly, Mirari’s Wake and Zendikar Resurgent will make your lands produce double mana, while also buffing creatures and drawing you cards. There are other great Warriors that do different things so let’s take a look at those now:

Warriors:

It seems that every color represents the warrior tribe fairly well, except for blue which is only present in multi-colored warriors and the lone Nimbus Champion. Still, there is a lot of good stuff here, most of these warriors being rare or mythic rarity means they tend to have pretty good effects on them. Some are better than others, but you can see the synergy. We’ll be creating tokens left and right, and we can use those tokens in various ways. Like I mentioned earlier, with Cryptolith Rite you’ll be able to tap those little 1/1’s for mana and that’s a boon for any 5-color deck. You can also sacrifice warriors to Brion Stoutarm (fling them at targets) or Blood-Chin Fanatic (extort effect), and as a bonus if you have Butcher of Malakir out at the same time enemies will have to do some sacrificing as well. There are far too mana effects to go over here, but you should look over the cards. There are many options out there that I didn’t use, but I found that these to be some of the best effects on Warrior bodies out there. The only two that I added from Battlebond are the Decorated Champion and Nimbus Champion, both who have warriors-matter effects. One of the main themes of the deck besides being tribal is extra combat steps, so let’s look at the support section of the deck:

Support:

From being able to take extra combat steps (Relentless Assault, Savage Beating, World at War), to buffing your creatures (Overwhelming Stampede, True Conviction, Cathars’ Crusade) to Warriors matter (Raiders’ Spoils, Secure the Wastes), to standard tribal includes (Kindred Discovery, Coat of Arms, Vanquisher’s Banner), you’ll find a ton of synergy and should be making a ton of tokens and buffing your creatures quickly — then take as many combats as you need in order to smash you opponents. I’m not sure where Najeela will fit on the tier list (probably around tier 3) but I think this deck will be fun to pilot nonetheless. You could also go a completely different route and still make use of her extra combat ability, but I think tribal warriors is the way to go! You can see the full deck list here.

It’s been a while since I gave a new mobile title a whirl, and Paladins Strike was a game I pre-registered for so that I could check it out when it was available. As regular readers will know, I’m a fan of much of what the developers Hi-Rez Studios have created in the past, from the Smite franchise to Paladins, which this mobile title is based on. Smite Tactics is still a thing too, though I understand why people aren’t too keen on the company due to some things that happened with Tribes, etc. I wasn’t so thrilled myself about some of the monetization that was going on that Isey covered so well earlier this year. Honestly I hadn’t played it for a couple months before he had talked about this stuff and haven’t played it since then. At least they went back on the whole thing, and I’ve actually given some thought to playing it more often again, been in the mood to revisit some old titles I spent a lot of time on… things like League of Legends, Awesomenauts (actually played that one a little over the weekend) and Smite. Anyway, let’s get back to the main event!

Paladins Strike showed up on my Google Play store at some point a few months back and I ended up hitting the preregister button. I had forgotten all about it until I was notified that it was ready for download. I’ve had it installed for a bit but finally found the time this weekend to check it out and I was fairly impressed! The game plunks you down into a tutorial mode, and explains the above control scheme to you. I was wondering how they would translate the gameplay of a team based shooter to a mobile platform, but it seems to work well enough despite utilizing the touch screen. You’ll move your champion with one thumb and aim/shoot with the other. Extra buttons are present to represent the abilities of characters that you’ll already know if you played the full Paladins game.

As you can see from the above screens, this looks more like a traditional MOBA and not a first person shooter. Despite being set up in a different fashion, the rest of the game is nearly identical to Paladins. The characters are the same and have the same abilities, and though the maps aren’t the same, they do feature capture points and payloads to push, just like in the original game.

The menus and interface are spot on in look and feel compared to the original Paladins. There is a cheeky monetization system that might lure some folks in… some free spins for chests and things await, and you can of course pay real money to buy skins and things. I’ve been known to do these things in the past but I don’t see myself spending money on this one. It’s an interesting title, but not money worthy at this point.

I played a round after the tutorial and felt like the game ran pretty smoothly over Wi-Fi. I didn’t test on pure phone signal, but I assume you wouldn’t want to play it under those conditions due to lag. I felt like most people didn’t really try to dodge or move around much, our enemies just funneled into our team and were slaughtered over and over again. I can see where the game could be fairly competitive but hardware lag is probably a thing on some phones. It was fine for me but it’s always hard to say with all the hardware that’s out there. I’d check it out if you’re looking for something a little more involved on your phone, but otherwise you’re probably better off playing on PC or a console.

Starting yesterday and running through the long holiday weekend, Steam presented us with a new platform event that is different than what we’ve come to expect. Usually when Steam has any sort of event it coincides with a big sale — originally there was the Summer and Winter sales, but now there’s sales in Spring and Fall and sometimes in-between. There have been mini-games and collections and other things to do within the platform along with those juicy discounts on games you’ve been wanting but haven’t purchased yet. This time around, I couldn’t find any sale information, it’s purely an event with tasks — sort of a metagame within the Steam platform.

For the four days of the sale, there are Daily tasks. These will rotate out each day, and if you completed them, the little trophy at the bottom of each will be filled in. When you click on the “post-it” it will present you with “qualifying games” from your library (or from a dozen or so that are free to play for the weekend) that you’ll play and then the task is completed. This means you can either actually do what they’re aiming for — getting you to actually play the games in your library — or just start the game and immediately close it just to get the trophy. I did a mixture of both.

Besides the daily tasks, there are projects as well, that don’t appear to change or refresh, you just have to finish these once. As you can see, I ran through these as well last night but in some cases I had to re-download the title just to complete the task. I wasn’t about to go and play Overlord or Torchlight again, but I did a run in FTL and Hellbound, along with firing up Eon Altar for the first time. Honestly it’s kind of silly for them to push you into playing old games you haven’t played much of or hadn’t played in a long time. I suppose that helps their concurrent users metrics, but otherwise doesn’t seem to do much of anything aside from helping you to unlock a new badge for your profile.

As you can see, I completed the tasks for Day 1, along with the project. It seems that you’ll have to do all of these each of the four days in order to get the maximum level badge. I’m going out of town this weekend though, so I’ll likely only get a day or two finished.

The only visible reward so far is this “Mystery Item” that appeared in my inventory after completing part of the tasks. There was a bundle of emotes as well, but I never use those, usually just turn them into gems for use for booster packs later on or whatever. The description says “This item might be useful in a future sale” which tells us absolutely fuck all. I assume that it will be a discount coupon similar to those you can see in my inventory. It’s not very reassuring when it says “might be useful” because that doesn’t really apply to everyone. Perhaps this is all just a waste of time? Or maybe it’s a great idea, I’m not sure yet. Will have to see what happens during the summer sale and what this item really is to judge its worth. It’s still nice to see that the company is always trying new things though, so I guess that’s all we can ask for.

Battlebond is the newest product from Wizards to be a sort of filler set between blocks of standard sets. Think of sets like Conspiracy (and it’s sequel Conspiracy: Take the Crown), where the set is sort of stand alone, introduces some different mechanics, and is meant to be drafted. Where this set stands alone is that it’s the first (to my knowledge) set to embrace the Two-Headed Giant format. This means four players make up teams of two and go head to head to head to head. You get the idea.

I like the 2HG format. It’s fun to have a teammate and multiplayer formats are definitely more engaging than the traditional 1v1 style. What’s great about this set is that not only is it embracing 2HG, but it’s also providing some excellent Commander format cards. Also, many expensive cards are receiving a reprint, and that’s probably the most exciting part. A little disappointing too though, as I just bought a Seedborn Muse for $25 about a month ago and that’s now being reprinted, but I’ve said too much. This week is spoilers week for the set which releases on June 8th. It hasn’t been fully spoiled yet, but I’ll point you in the direction of the spoilers. There are a few cards that I’d like to talk about anyway, so let’s get to that.

Big Money Reprints:

I recently sold off nearly all of my Planeswalkers recently because I decided against a “Superfriends” build as the cornerstone of the deck is Doubling Season, a card that spiked to upwards of $75. This reprint should bring the price down a bit, or I might get lucky and open one. Some other noteables are Diabolic Intent (an equally expensive Diabolic Tutor), Land Tax (great ramp for white and about $25), Nirkana Revenant (cabal coffers on legs and also $25), True-Name Nemesis (a nice tool for merfolk decks, but kinda busted 1v1), and the aforementioned Seedborn Muse. These are staples for EDH, and I’ll be aiming for getting my hands on copies of each.

New Mechanics:

Partner itself isn’t a new keyword. There were partner commanders introduced in the Commander 2016 sets. Planeswalkers as commanders aren’t a new thing either, as that was done in 2014 I believe. However, Planeswalkers that can be your commander and have partner are a new thing. We’ve only seen the one pair so far, but I’m interested to see more of these. We also know that Commander 2018 sets will be led by Planeswalkers as well, so its likely there will be some good additions coming. “Partner with” is also something new, where the two legendary creatures will tutor the other out when one is played, which means they do double duty. There are several examples of these in the set, but I only wanted to highlight a couple. Another new keyword is Assist, which allows another player to pay a portion of a spell’s CMC, while the Support keyword has been revisited (this one distributes +1/+1 counters based on the number following the keyword).

Notables:

Archfiend of Despair is a reprint and is a nice card (might throw that one into Kaalia). Archon of Valor’s Reach is an interesting concept for a Commander. Arena Rector is great for superfriends or any deck playing a handful of Planeswalkers as PW specific tutors aren’t really out there. The new land cycle should be auto includes for EDH decks as you’ll always have more than one opponent. Najeela looks like a busted new general, and screams to be made into a Warrior tribal deck — best part is it’s 5-color, so you can pick the very best warriors and spells to support them. This will likely be a fresh brew for me coming soon! Lastly, Sentinel Tower feels like it can be busted, especially in spellslinger decks. Might have to try it out in Kess.

That’s all for now. I may revisit the topic when the set is fully spoiled, or once I get a new brew done. Until then, happy gaming!

I first jotted down thoughts about Battle Chasers: Nightwar a couple of months back. It was a round-up post though, so I didn’t go into too much detail, and hadn’t really played it for more than a few minutes to that point. It wasn’t too long ago that I was burning through my backlog at a rapid clip, but that train had lost some steam in recent months mainly because I was having a hard time deciding what to play. I’ve spent some time in a fair number of titles but none had really sunk their hooks into me. I came back around to this game and it’s been holding my attention more than the others, so this is likely the next game I’ll play through to completion.

I’m in love with the aesthetic of Battle Chasers. It was apparently inspired by a series of graphic novels, which makes sense given the artwork in the game which appears as a hand-drawn style. The mixture of high fantasy and some sci-fi elements works, and the gameplay is the normal tried and true JRPG turn-based style but it doesn’t feel stale. You’ll be earning levels in no time, and that means new abilities and actions will become available to you. Starting with a group of three adventurers, you’ll eventually reunite with others and have a little variety in your group composition on top of the new gear and upgrades you’ll earn along the way. There’s even an alternate advancement tree that will allow you to further customize your heroes.

When I left off, I had made it to the little town that serves as an HQ of sorts, complete with an Inn to rest at, and vendors to buy/sell goods too. There’s some light crafting too, so everything you pick up tends to have a purpose. Soon enough, my party was heading into their first real challenge… a dungeon!

The Iron Outpost:

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The Iron Outpost was easy enough, it was the first dungeon of the game after all. The final boss was a sword demon thing… there’s not a good way to describe it, but it looked pretty cool nonetheless! It was mostly overrun with bandits and they were XP fodder leading up to the final battle.

The Rushlands and Path of Fangs:

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Long story short, we were trying to get to another part of the map and it was blocked by a large cannon that would shoot anything that came too close. Unfortunately the only way around was via a teleporter, but the power had been lost. We headed to another cave and fought off some elementals to get a power source which we used to turn the teleporter back on. Soon we were in the Rushlands, and we came across our second dungeon, The Path of Fangs. This one was headed by a bunch of lycanthropes (called something else but similar) and I was charged with killing off the leaders of a couple of tribes. After doing so, one of their kind let me pass through the other side of the dungeon. We then took out the bandit manning the cannon, and could then freely pass through a short cut back to the starter town.

Fishing:

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Like many an RPG before it, there is a fishing mini-game that is fairly easy to partake in. You have to use one character in particular (pictured above) to fish, but he comes equipped with the rod and line to handle business. I managed to catch a couple of unique fish so far, some of which can be sold for some alternate currencies that can buy you some skins and bad ass gear in large quantities.

Story:

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The storyline plays out over time, and like most RPGs of this style, you only get bits and pieces as you go along. We’ve met what I think is either the main villain or at least an antagonist, but she was nice enough to our faces. We later learned that she was behind some of the goings-on, so that leads me to believe we’ll see more of here soon. We eventually found one of our lost party members and he’s a pretty powerful mage. There’s also some random events where you can be attacked by a passing airship, which I thought was pretty cool, though a little more difficult than the typical battles, and confusing as to how you end up fighting on the ship itself. Nonetheless, we found ourselves heading into Junk Town, which I think may end up being the 3rd dungeon but I have yet to enter.

Overall I think the game is great, and it’s been on sale recently on both PSN and Steam. If you like JRPG style games, I’d highly recommend this one!